School Play (BBC TV) Coming Soon

 

School Play was a single drama broadcast by BBC TV in November 1979 that seems to have vanished completely since.

I’m pleased to say that I have been given a copy of the full play and will be uploading scenes from it over the coming (2024) Christmas holidays.

The play, written by Frederic Raphael, is based on his experiences as a boy at Charterhouse School in the late 1940s and early 1950s. All the schoolboys are played by adult actors.

In an interview still available on YouTube Raphael says it’s about a bunch of people at a public school who never leave. They get older and older in the House and they become monitors and various other things, but they never leave school.

He says the play was directed as if it were a ‘revenge on Charterhouse’.

He goes on, ‘And the BBC showed it and it was a great success. That’s to say, lots of people watched it and it got very good reviews, but they never repeated it because somebody at the BBC realised, so they said, what I was really doing which was satirising them. I was also, of course, satirising just about everything else that there was in England.

‘That’s what satire does, chum. But it was not well regarded. I’ve never actually done anything for the BBC television from that day on. So there.’

Picture credits: BBC TV

 

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